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E-ZPass Bugs Give Cheats A Free Ride

New Jersey's electronic system for ticketing E-ZPass toll cheats has so many bugs in it that the state has not mailed out violation notices since July for nearly all of the system's 320 toll lanes, state officials said today.

As a result, New Jersey is operating on a kind of honor system for hundreds of thousands of drivers who cruise the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway and other toll roads in the state. Violations are being recorded at about 30 booths, but the entire system will not be repaired until March, officials said.

The problem is only the latest embarrassment for transportation officials in New Jersey, an auto-besotted state where several driving-related programs -- including emissions testing cost overruns and fraud in the motor vehicles department -- have turned into political headaches for the administration of Gov. James E. McGreevey.

James P. Fox, the transportation commissioner, said today that the state decided on July 15 to suspend ticketing because the system was mailing out thousands of false notices of toll cheating to honest drivers, as many as eight to some families. The violations system, he said, was so inaccurate that the state was spending at the rate of $20 million a year to collect $13 million in fines.

The suspension of ticketing was first reported today in The Star-Ledger of Newark.

In an interview, Mr. Fox said today that state officials had assumed in July that the ticketing system would be repaired within six weeks, but instead found that it was so deeply flawed that the entire system could not be repaired until March.

The system is supposed to catch drivers who do not subscribe to E-ZPass but still use one of the automated lanes at tollbooths to avoid payment. Mr. Fox said the state can now be certain that only 10 percent of the automated toll lanes are recording violations correctly. A spokesman said those lanes were producing negligible amounts of income for the system, however, because violations were so infrequent.

''We are using a common-sense approach here,'' Mr. Fox said today. ''One of the things that drove the public crazy, and rightfully so, was that people were receiving bogus violations notices.''

Mr. Fox is scheduled to take over as Mr. McGreevey's chief of staff in January, and today he was already performing one of the job's functions, political damage controller. He emphasized that the E-ZPass debacle -- its technological glitches and its hundreds of millions of dollars in operating deficits -- was inherited from the Republican administration of Gov. Christie Whitman, and that the McGreevey Democrats were going to fix it.

''When we came in, the biggest debacle we inherited was E-ZPass,'' Mr. Fox said. ''The previous administration started a system that cost $469 million and they told the public, in short, that they would have something for nothing and that toll violators would pay the bill. They were not being honest.''

A spokesman for Mrs. Whitman, who is now the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, did not return a phone call seeking comment tonight.

State officials are also slowly replacing thousands of faulty transponders, the electronic signal boxes affixed to windshields or license plates that transmit identifying data as a car passes through an E-ZPass tollbooth. The officials acknowledge that many E-ZPass users are unknowingly failing to pay tolls because their transponders are not working properly.

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The violations ticketing system involves a complicated interchange between cameras that photograph the license numbers of toll violators and computers that look up plate numbers and send out the violation notices. The decision to suspend all ticketing came after officials discovered that the various components were not communicating correctly, with the result that tens of thousands of false violation notices were being sent out. Except for the faulty transponders, the E-ZPass toll-collection system is working normally.

State officials would not say which tollbooths have working violation systems and which have faulty ones, and said drivers who tried to beat the system would still risk being ticketed.

Nearly 1.1 million people subscribe to New Jersey's E-ZPass system. The problems do not affect automated toll systems in other states, or the E-ZPass lanes at Hudson River crossings into New York City.

Transportation officials blame the two major contractors in charge of operating the system, WorldCom Inc. and J. P. Morgan Chase, for many of the system's failures. Both have been replaced by a new contractor, ACS State and Local Government Solutions, which signed a 10-year, $450 million contract with the state on Tuesday.

But state officials said today that the change of contractors had been delayed by J. P. Morgan Chase's failure to turn over some of its files -- a charge the company denies. ''We are actively working with the state and the new vendor to transition E-ZPass,'' said Kristen Batteria, a spokeswoman for J. P. Morgan Chase, ''and everything is on schedule.''

To pay for the E-ZPass system, and to end the false hope that there were enough dishonest drivers to pay for it, the state in July imposed a $1 monthly surcharge per account, producing about $1.1 million a month, and ended the 2-cent discount for E-ZPass users on the Garden State Parkway tolls, worth about $12 million a year in new income.

''When everything is fixed, our financing plan -- the membership fees and the discount rollback -- will not include fines from toll violators,'' Mr. Fox said. ''We're not going to rely on them for income because you never know if you're dealing with a thousand violations a month or 50.''

E-ZPass users maintain a cash account, normally drawn on a credit card, that is paid down as each toll is charged. The system derives some of its income by pocketing the interest on those account balances.

Mr. Fox was keen to point out that as the state struggled to put E-ZPass on a sound financial footing, it was going ahead with plans to expand the number of automated E-ZPass lanes, and to build new high-speed lanes that do not require drivers to slow down to pay the toll.

For all its setbacks, Mr. Fox said, the E-ZPass system has been growing steadily. It lost 1,800 members after the monthly fee was imposed in July, but it has since gained 50,000 ones.